Does your staffing subcommittee circulate an agenda/ summons and minutes?

Question

Our staffing subcommittee meets in private, states that its business is always confidential (it’s not) and does not issue minutes to any other councillors that I’m aware of. We have received guidance from our county advisory body which says that minutes should be circulated. I am being quoted LTN which states that I don’t need to know everything. I do get that, but minutes? A proper Agenda?

Answer 1

Who is telling you this?  It is just plain wrong.
If you can’t get any sense from whoever is telling you this refer to IA / EA & ICO as a breach of model publication scheme.
You seem to have no shortage of questions like this - what would you assess as the cause of all these problems?

Unqualified clerk?

Uninformed Cllrs?

Combination of the 2?

Lack of adequate guidance from county ALC?

Ineffective MO?

Comments

Thank you for your comments, and patience. It’s a combination of all, but also factional by clerk and councillors. The ALC guidance came from another enquiry about whether they could meet in private as a matter of course which they claim they can do. Instead of an agenda an email is sent from the clerk with a list of topics to be discussed. We never see any minutes. I will complain to the MO about this latest email from the Chair of the subcommittee which appears to imply they have made a decision to withhold information on the basis of the LTN. They clearly don't remember the recent advice from the ALC which was copied to all councillors. It’s a terrible mess.

Answer 2

Your county office is correct.  Committee meetings are and must be open to the public so there should be a proper agenda and minutes.  Certain items can be discussed without members of the public in attendance and by the very nature of a staffing committee, there is a greater likelihood of this falling within a staffing committee meeting than most other committees but the procedure remains the same in that a resolution is required to exclude the public for that or those agenda items only.  It is also important to remember that the discussion is confidential for those items, not the decision so the minutes need to reflect this.  As a result, minutes of confidential items can often be a little vaguely written to ensure compliance with data protection rules etc.  but they still need to reflect that a decision was taken.

Comments

Thanks for your comments. It is a staffing SUBcommittee, which they say makes a difference as to whether they need to follow the same guidance as for other meetings. It’s a horrible mess, and the more one points out how wrong things are, the more one is labelled a troublemaker. I will try one more time with the chair of the staffing subcommittee to elicit their reasons for withholding these things from (a) me (a troublemaker) and (b) others (their friendly colleagues) and then make a complaint. If nothing else, this will alert the MO who has been known to advise even if not upholding a compliant.

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A sub-committee is a committee of a committee, so it must be governed by a parent committee. You can't just call it a sub-committee to get around the different rules for committees vs sub-committees. Whether it's a committee or a sub-committee, it must have appropriate terms of reference and delegated powers and these documents must be in the public domain.

Answer 3

General staffing committee meetings should be advertised minutes circulated however meeting such as clerk one to one’s, investigations are confidential between the line manager and employee.

Just because the employee is a clerk to the Parish it does not give the pubic the right to vie personal information

Comments

I’m asking about meetings of the staffing subcommittee. I understand that the other stuff is confidential.